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Fall Into Reading: Books to Go Back to School With!
posted by: Melissa | September 26, 2014, 06:18 PM   
We hope you’re settled into the school year! If you’re looking for some inspiration on what to read this fall, check out these suggestions:

BuildingABetterTeacher 1) Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (And How to Teach It To Everyone)
by: Elizabeth Green

What happens in the classroom of a great teacher? Opening with a moment-by-moment portrait of an everyday math lesson—a drama of urgent decisions and artful maneuvers—Building a Better Teacher demonstrates the unexpected complexity of teaching. Green focuses on the questions that really matter: How do we prepare teachers and what should they know before they enter the classroom? How does one get young minds to reason, conjecture, prove, and understand? What are the keys to good discipline? Incorporating new research from cognitive psychologists and education specialists as well as intrepid classroom entrepreneurs, Green provides a new way for parents to judge what their children need in the classroom and considers how to scale good ideas. Ultimately, Green discovers that good teaching is a skill. A skill that can be taught.
SmartestKidsInTheWorld 2) The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way
by: Amanda Ripley

In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems they’ve never seen before. They are learning to think, in other words, and to thrive in the modern economy. Inspired to find answers for our own children, author and Time magazine journalist Amanda Ripley follows three Americans embed¬ded in these countries for one year. Kim, fifteen, raises $10,000 so she can move from Oklahoma to Finland; Eric, eighteen, trades his high-achieving Minnesota suburb for a booming city in South Korea; and Tom, seventeen, leaves a historic Pennsylvania village for Poland. Through these young informants, Ripley meets battle-scarred reformers, sleep-deprived zombie students, and a teacher who earns $4 million a year. Their stories, along with groundbreaking research into learning in other cultures, reveal a pattern of startling transformation: none of these countries had many “smart” kids a few decades ago. Things had changed. Teaching had become more rigorous; parents had focused on things that mattered; and children had bought into the promise of education.
GradingSmarter 3) Grading Smarter, Not Harder: Assessment Strategies That Motivate Kids and Help Them Learn
by: Myron Dueck

In this lively and eye-opening book, educator Myron Dueck reveals how many of the assessment policies that teachers adopt can actually prove detrimental to student motivation and achievement and shows how we can tailor policies to address what really matters: student understanding of content.
PuttingEducationToWork 4) Putting Education to Work: How Cristo Rey High Schools Are Transforming Urban Education
by: Megan Sweas

Combining the latest advancements in instruction, a focus on spiritual values and character development, and an innovative work-study program, the Cristo Rey Network has reinvented urban education and revived a broken system. Catholic school for the twenty-first century, Cristo Rey offers underprivileged students the opportunities they deserve and the structure and committed teachers they need to succeed and build a better life. Filled with amazing stories of hardship and transformation, Putting Education to Work is a testimonial to the effectiveness of the Cristo Rey program, demonstrated through the lives of its students. Thanks to its rigorous college-prep curriculum and real-life job experience, students become “lifelong learners” who graduate with critical thinking skills and the experience needed for college and the work force. But the Cristo Rey education is not limited to the mind. Focusing on character growth, it ensures the formation of a “whole person” who understands his or her role in helping others.
ALightShinesInHarlem 5) A Light Shines in Harlem: New York’s First Charter School and the Movement It Led
by: Mary C. Bounds

A Light Shines in Harlem tells the fascinating story of the Sisulu-Walker Charter School of Harlem, the first charter school in New York, and of the charter movement. It is a penetrating look at the host of real-world decisions that make a charter school, or any school, succeed. And it is a true-to-life inspirational tale of how a hero of the civil rights movement, a Wall Street star, educators, inner-city activists, parents, and students all joined together to create a groundbreaking school that, in its best years, far outperformed other schools in the neighborhoods in which most of its children lived. This book also looks at education reform through a broader lens. It discusses the most recent research and issues facing the charter movement, a movement which now educates more than 2.5 million students nationwide. A Light Shines in Harlem describes the strengths and weaknesses of charter schools and explains how lessons from them can be applied to other schools to make all schools better. The result is not only the gripping inside narrative of how one school fought to succeed despite the odds but also an illuminating glimpse into the future of American education.






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